


Horizon

by ocean_of_notions



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: AU future fic, Babies, Earth, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-01-02
Updated: 2008-01-02
Packaged: 2017-11-12 09:49:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 424
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/489537
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ocean_of_notions/pseuds/ocean_of_notions
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes she's glad Cloud Nine was destroyed.<a id="cutid1" name="cutid1"></a></p>
            </blockquote>





	Horizon

**Author's Note:**

> On Earth, some indeterminate amount of time in the future. At least 6 years past season 3.

  
Sometimes Kara wishes Cloud Nine hadn’t been destroyed.

 

Her six-year-old daughter complains of the sunlight that’s too bright, that turns on and off against her will at the change of shifts.  Her daughter doesn’t like the wind and doesn’t understand the rain.

 

Sometimes Kara thinks of flight simulators and how hard—how dangerous—it is to jump into flight without first learning to breathe in space.  Like leaping off a cliff and just praying that the winds will catch you and hold you up.  But then she thinks about the rush of launch and the inexplicable serenity of the black emptiness—just empty space and points of light.  She thinks that those simulators are just cheap imitations, and she prefers the fall. 

 

Sometimes she’s glad Cloud Nine was destroyed.

 

The first night on Earth, her daughter had nightmares about the sun going out.  She had woken up in the middle of the night, and didn’t understand why it was dark outside the window, and oh lords it had never occurred to Lee or Kara to explain night to the little girl.

 

Lee sat up with their child for the rest of the night and they watched the sunrise from her bedroom window (it was cold and windy outside, extremes never found in the simulated climes of a battlestar).  Kara joined them for sunset that night, and it became a ritual.  Every morning Lee wakes up for the dawn, and every night Kara sits with her daughter as the sun sinks below the horizon and sets the sky aglow (her daughter once wondered aloud how the sky could burn when there was no fire in space).

 

Kara cherishes these times, and then she is thankful that her daughter never knew the simulations.

 

She remembers saying to Lee that they could’ve done a better job with the horizon.  She’s glad her daughter will never think that as they sit in twilight.  Her daughter may be wary of the wind and the rain and the taste of air that has not been recylced and processed and purified and pumped through a vent, but at least she loves this raw beauty.  At least she doesn’t look at the sky and wonder where the electrical lines are, the criss-cross of the shield that keeps the vacuum at bay.

 

Kara is glad that Cloud Nine was destroyed because a tiny part of her can’t help remembering the ease and the security of the simulations and wondering if it wouldn’t be better if her daughter hadn’t had to make the leap.

 


End file.
